- defense spending. $46 billion in cuts will hitthepentagon. aboutthe same amount would hit discretionary. it would be an 8.5 to 9% across- the-board cut for every agency of the government, with some extensions. most of the entitlement spending on medicare, social security, is largely spare from these cuts. >> give us a quick review about how the idea of the sequestered came about. >> this has become washington lore at this point. of how this happened. bob woodward has been putting forward his findings in a very pronounced way lately. according to him, this idea originally came from jack lew in the 1980's. they had some budget fights. they used a proposal as an enforcement trigger. you would come up -- you would come up with a smarter way to do it and forced congress to come up with a deal. jack lew, they are trying to come to an agreement and rather than another round of the debt seal the increase, the white house did not want to go through that again before the election so they said, how do we use sequestration, the automatic across-the-board cuts. they have to convince boehner this was